Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: Perplexity’s Grand Theft AI (emphasis mine):

“Someone else did it” is a fine argument for a five-year-old. And consider the response further. If Srinivas wanted to be ethical, he had some options here. Option one is to terminate the contract with the third-party scraper. Option two is to try to convince the scraper to honor robots.txt. Srinivas didn’t commit to either, and it seems to me, there’s a clear reason why. Even if Perplexity itself isn’t violating the code, it is reliant on someone else violating the code for its “answer engine” to work.

Get absolutely wrecked, Perplexity. I tried it for a month and found it to be a plagiarism engine masquerading as an up-and-up search engine. Then Robb Knight found that they ignore robots.txt, Wired confirmed it, and just today 404 Media found even more skeeziness.

It really is a shame because the product itself is so well designed…it’s just designed to do something skeezy and is being run by people who don’t particularly care about doing things the right way.